Ben Gardiner;Armament Chief 729th Squadron - 452nd Bomb Wing Korea

Fortunately or unfortunately I was selected to be in the advance group of personnel to fly to our designated base, Itazuke Japan. There were only three of us from the 729th Bomb squadron, Major Maddux, myself and one other enlisted man, can't remember his name. We were there waiting for those first planes to arrive. They were in fine condition and the crews were very eager to go on their first mission. I was the only 729th armament man available to load these aircraft so I had to find help. As you stated, the rest of the Wing was on it's way by slow boat.

The bomb load for the first mission was to be 260 pound fragmentation bombs which contained composition B powder. Typically this type of bomb was used for medium to high level raids because of the sensitivity of this explosive. Composition B will explode on contact with the ground with or without a fuse. We sent two aircraft out on this first mission and then waited for the results. The results were two flying sieves, they had holes in the wings and the fuselage, large and small and one hell of a lot of them. They had gone in on a strafing run and decided to drop their bombs at ground level not realizing that they might blow up on contact. We had to send both aircraft to the Tokyo repair group to have them recycled. These were just the first that we sent to Tokyo, there were quite a few more sent as Korean War progressed
Note:

LTC Walter S King, CO 13th Bomb Squadron was killed on 2/21/51 when some Comp B ,1000# bombs were dropped on a low level mission, exploded on contact and destroyed the A/C.